TRANSPORTATION: Ratings focus attention on problem bridges

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Tim Bakken, area bridge maintenance engineer, measures a pothole in the Hathaway Creek Bridge as Jeff Johns as senior bridge engineer keeps an eye out for traffic on Highway 38 on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014. Caltrans inspectors looking over bridges for storm damage. For story on the overall condition of Inland road bridges.

Tim Bakken, area bridge maintenance engineer, makes notes during the inspection of the Hathaway Creek Bridge, on Highway 38 on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014. Caltrans inspectors looking over bridges for storm damage. For story on the overall condition of Inland road bridges.

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Tim Bakken, area bridge maintenance engineer, inspects under the Santa Ana River Bridge, on Highway 38 on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014. Caltrans inspectors looking over bridges for storm damage. For story on the overall condition of Inland road bridges.

Tim Bakken, area bridge maintenance engineer and Jeff Johns a senior bridge engineer inspect the deck of the Hathaway Creek Bridge on Highway 38 on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014. Caltrans inspectors looking over bridges for storm damage. For story on the overall condition of Inland road bridges.

Tim Bakken, area bridge maintenance engineer, measures a pothole in the Hathaway Creek Bridge as Jeff Johns as senior bridge engineer keeps an eye out for traffic on Highway 38 on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014. Caltrans inspectors looking over bridges for storm damage. For story on the overall condition of Inland road bridges.

Tim Bakken, left, area bridge maintenance engineer and Jeff Johns a senior bridge engineer inspect the deck of the Hathaway Creek Bridge on Highway 38 on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014. Caltrans inspectors looking over bridges for storm damage. For story on the overall condition of Inland road bridges.

Tim Bakken, area bridge maintenance engineer, left, and Jeff Johns a senior bridge engineer hop the guardrail to inspect under Hathaway Creek Bridge on Highway 38 on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2014. Caltrans inspectors looking over bridges for storm damage. For story on the overall condition of Inland road bridges.

Edwin Emwedo, a senior bridge inspector, looks up as Tim Bakken, area bridge maintenance engineer, crawls under the Santa Ana River Bridge to inspect it on the 38 on Sept. 11.

Where are California’s ailing bridges? Chances are, right under your wheels.

Every day, tens of thousands of Inland residents cross over bridges, including freeway spans, rated “structurally deficient” by Caltrans engineers. By one estimate, the rating applies to one in every 10 Inland road bridges.

The rating doesn’t mean a bridge is about to collapse. Caltrans officials said they would close a bridge if it becomes too dangerous.

Structurally deficient bridges highlight the age of America’s transportation infrastructure, said Jeffrey Scala, an East Coast-based engineer who used to inspect bridges for Connecticut.

“You can put a bridge out there in the middle of nowhere with not a single vehicle on it and it can deteriorate just because of age and moisture,” he said.

The ratings are “an indication of a poorly performing infrastructure that will cause more problems in the future,” said Kent Harries, an associate professor of structural engineering and mechanics at the University of Pittsburgh.

“We built infrastructure in this nation and we have largely neglected maintenance.”

That point is underscored by a recent infrastructure report released by the League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties and regional transportation planning groups.

The report found a $1.3 billion gap between local bridge repair needs and the money available to meet them. San Bernardino County alone will need $243 million to fix or replace its run-down local bridges, according to the report.

Major bridge collapses are rare. In 2007, an eight-lane bridge on Interstate 35 in Minneapolis fell into the Mississippi River, killing 13. A design flaw was blamed for the collapse, although the bridge had a structurally deficient rating going back to 1990.

In 2013, three people were injured after a part of a bridge carrying Interstate 5 over a river in Washington state collapsed and sent two cars into the water. The bridge was not considered structurally deficient and investigators blamed the collapse to an oversized load striking overhead support beams.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and a freeway viaduct to collapse. Forty-three people were killed.

Experts and officials blame the lack of funding in part on the decline in gasoline tax revenue. Taxable sales of gas in California are falling as more drivers switch to vehicles that burn fuel more efficiently as well as hybrid and electric vehicles.

Caltrans District 8, which covers the Inland area, has $26 million budgeted this year to fix and replace bridges, down from $33 million in 2013.

From 2011 to 2012, the district had at least $61 million a year for bridge repairs. The drop was due to the completion of seismic retrofit work and the completion of work to replace Interstate 40 bridges, said Caltrans spokeswoman Terri Kasinga.

“Bridge repair projects are developed and prioritized based on conditions found during field inspections and documented in bridge inspection reports,” she said.

HOW MANY?

It’s not exactly clear how many Inland bridges have structural problems. Riverside and San Bernardino counties had 68 structurally deficient state highway bridges in April 2014 – 4.4 percent of all state highway bridges – down from 126 such bridges in April 2010, Caltrans reported.

A 2013 report by Washington D.C.-based Transportation for America found 130 structurally deficient bridges in Riverside County and 199 in San Bernardino County – more than one in every 10 spans. Non-highway bridges were included in the report.

Riverside County owns and operates 108 bridges, 19 of which are structurally deficient, said county spokesman Ray Smith. Six bridges in the desert have been posted with load restrictions and all of those are scheduled to be replaced, he said.

Seventy-nine of 191 bridges controlled by San Bernardino County – four in 10 – are structurally deficient, said Roni Edis of the county Department of Public Works.

None of the 10 most heavily traveled state highway bridges in Riverside County is structurally deficient, Kasinga said. One of the 10 oldest bridges gets that rating, but it only sees one vehicle a day, she said.

Those numbers don’t include bridges owned by cities.

ZERO TO NINE

Federal law requires road bridges 20 feet or longer to be inspected at least once every two years. Caltrans performs nearly all those inspections.

Inspectors check every bridge’s deck – the part driven on – the superstructure, which supports the deck, and the substructure, which supports the superstructure. To earn a structurally deficient rating, a bridge must score four or less on a zero-to-nine scale for its deck, superstructure or substructure.

A numerical score can mean different things. For example, a deck rating of four indicates cracking while a rating of 2 could apply to fatigue cracks in steel or shear cracks in concrete.

Bridges also can earn “functionally obsolete” ratings, meaning its design has become outdated due to increased traffic or other reasons. “Fracture critical” bridges do not contain redundant supporting elements; there are 14 in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, Kasinga said.

No action is automatically taken when a bridge is rated structurally deficient, Kasinga said. Decisions on which bridges to repair or replace aren’t solely based on whether they have a structurally deficient rating, Kasinga said.

“Recommendations from field assessments and analyses form the basis on which repair projects are developed,” she said.

Smith, the Riverside County spokesman, downplayed the significance of a structurally deficient rating.

“Based on the grading scale, a bridge could be called structurally deficient as the result of conditions that are not structural at all, like peeling paint or rough, broken pavement on top of the bridge deck,” he said.

“Neither is a condition that has anything to do with immediate safety or the soundness of a bridge. But if left unattended for a long time, those issues might eventually create structural problems due to rust, etc.”

Harries, the engineering professor, said compared to other states, Southern California’s bridges are in relatively good shape, in part because there’s little need to use corrosive road salt to melt ice.

Wear and tear on bridges isn’t so much due to commuters as it is to truck traffic, said Jerry de Santos, interim deputy director of construction for Caltrans District 8.

“It’s the goods movement. That’s why I-40 is so beat up,” he said. “When the economy’s good, it creates more wear on our system.”

R.J. Cervantes, director of legislative affairs for the California Trucking Association, said trucks pay weight fees that generate billions of dollars annually for transportation maintenance. But those funds get diverted to pay debt on transportation bonds, he said.

As a result, over the past four years, fewer bridges have been fixed compared to the early 1990s, Transportation for America said.

One of the challenges in paying for bridge repairs is the federal gas tax, a traditional infrastructure funding source that has stayed at 18.3 cents per gallon since 1994.

“It’s a user fee and people use the roads,” said Andy Herrmann, past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “It’s a pay-as-you-go … and we’re not paying for it.”

California, which faced a $157 million gas tax revenue shortfall in 2012, raised its gas tax to from 36 to 39 1/2 cents a gallon last year. But the state gas tax is only worth half its value compared to 1994, according to Matt Cate, executive director of the California State Association of Counties.

Gas tax revenue further declines as drivers switch to electric cars and more fuel-efficient vehicles, said Inland Reps. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, and Mark Takano, D-Riverside. One alternative is to tax drivers based on their road usage, but that raises privacy concerns because GPS-like devices might have to be installed in vehicles, Takano said.

Calvert and Takano disagree on the best way to pump more money into transportation infrastructure. Takano wants Congress to tackle a long-term transportation funding bill during its lame-duck session this winter. The current bill runs through next spring.

Calvert thinks it’s unrealistic to pass a long-term bill before the end of the year. He said red tape that delays bridge repairs needs to be cut, and corporate tax reform could bring in money from overseas that could be spent on transportation infrastructure.

As revenues fall, cities and counties are forced to do more with less, said Cate in a recent news release.

“It’s time to get serious about a more stable funding source for local streets, roads and bridges so we can begin to catch up on a backlog of work that should have been completed long ago,” he said.

Jeff Horseman got into journalism because he liked to write and stunk at math. He grew up in Vermont and he honed his interviewing skills as a supermarket cashier by asking Bernie Sanders “Paper or plastic?” After graduating from Syracuse University in 1999, Jeff began his journalistic odyssey at The Watertown Daily Times in upstate New York, where he impressed then-U.S. Senate candidate Hillary Clinton so much she called him “John” at the end of an interview. From there, he went to Annapolis, Maryland, where he covered city, county and state government at The Capital newspaper before love and the quest for snowless winters took him in 2007 to Southern California, where he started out covering Temecula for The Press-Enterprise. Today, Jeff writes about Riverside County government and regional politics. Along the way, Jeff has covered wildfires, a tropical storm, 9/11 and the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino. If you have a question or story idea about politics or the inner workings of government, please let Jeff know. He’ll do his best to answer, even if it involves a little math.